Comparative Studies on Functional Foods and Health Foods in China

With the rapid development of the economy and society and the increasing improvement of people’s living standards, people have gained a scientific understanding of the sub-health state of the body. Many foods with functional claims such as supplementing dietary nutrients, maintaining or improving the body’s health status and reducing the risk of disease have emerged on the market. At the same time, as the country has introduced new policies, laws and regulations such as the “Healthy China 2030” plan to support the development of the health industry, the objective need for food functional claims has become increasingly apparent. But our current laws and regulations do not clearly definite the concept of functional foods and its requirements, so the directions of research, production and sale, market recognition and market regulation of functional foods are unclear. In particular, functional foods cannot be discriminated from health foods, which have a legal definition. In the long term, this will not only fail to promote scientific and technological innovations in ordinary foods, but also hinder the healthy development of the health food industry. In this paper, information concerning the definition and requirements of functional foods is collected and sorted out from government official documents, websites, academic journals, and other authoritative media, and the current focuses of research on functional foods in China and abroad are compared by visual analysis of high-frequency keywords. Moreover, this paper differentiates between the requirements for functional foods and those for health foods, and it suggests that top-level design be made for refined classification of functional foods on the market and puts forward suggestions on how to better connect each category with the current system.